


Sound and Fury, Signifying

by LoveThemFiercely



Series: Drabbles and Prompts [9]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Needs A Hug, But They're Not Quite There Yet, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Loneliness, Past Gaslighting, Rey Needs A Hug, Self-Harm, Tumblr Prompt, past emotional/psychological abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 14:06:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveThemFiercely/pseuds/LoveThemFiercely
Summary: Kylo Ren (as he thinks of himself)/Ben Solo (as Rey thinks of him) is beginning to notice how quiet it is inside his head now that his Master is gone.  Rey is beginning to understand.





	Sound and Fury, Signifying

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr prompt from @kuresoto: Reylo + "Please don't leave me alone."

"Don't leave me alone."

 

It was a whisper, more breath than speech.  Rey didn't think it was even loud enough for his mask to project it into the room.

 

Rey had been trying to find a way to exit the space between them, imagining doors and paths as though that might allow her mind to leave, as it would have her body.  Truthfully, she'd thought it might be like salt in a wound, having her intrude on his mind after she'd refused him, though she couldn't imagine having done anything else.  But Rey still had no idea how this connection between them worked.

 

She looked around at the crowded bridge.   **But you're not alone.  There are plenty of people here.**  Rey was baffled.  His definition of alone must be different than hers.  The nights in her AT-AT shelter, the marks on the wall, flitted through her thoughts.  She wondered that he wasn't concerned about her seeing all this. She wondered why she wasn't paying attention to any of it; just him.

 

Abruptly he stepped away from the controls and the others in the room.  A voice came from behind him as he went. "Ren?" A beat, and a breath.  "Supreme Leader," the voice grudgingly choked from between gritted teeth, "May I inquire where you are going?  We're not yet finished. There is much to discuss."

 

He kept walking, but he spoke audibly this time.  "It's late. I have tasks of my own to perform. Unless you'd prefer my...particular skills be exercised here?"  The general flinched. Rey was reasonably certain that no one else on the bridge had noticed the minute movement, but Ben saw it, and a flash of savage satisfaction revealed his awareness of the other man's fear to Rey.

 

She'd noticed that her mind refused to identify him any other way, now, than as Ben.  It was, she supposed, some kind of hope. He continued, voice flat through the mechanical modulation. "I'm certain you'll find a means of contacting me if there's anything that requires skills other than...administration."  The other man's eyes were full of hatred, sliding greasily alongside fear.

 

Ben's long strides took him to a lift.  Rey was curious; and she still didn't know how to leave, even if she'd wanted to go.  The doors *whooshed* closed behind him.

 

"Please." Barely vocalized at all. A second "please"? Wonders never ceased. It was just the two of them in the small space.   She wished she could see his expression, hear his tone. He repeated the words. "Don't leave me alone." Even the vocoder couldn't disguise the tremor.  His thoughts opened before her, as though the cracks in his voice were reproducing themselves in the walls inside his mind.

 

His voice was quiet, but his head was busy with soundless images.  People left him, over and over, inside. Sometimes they had no choice, and it really was his fault; his mind shuddered and fled the slender red-lit span and the gentle hand on his face. In some of the images she could see his younger self plead with people who were already gone. _Don't leave me alone!_ Very much as he was doing now, aloud, quietly here beside her.

 

Ship's engines took people away from him, sometimes, as he watched. Rey knew that pain, and it made her stomach twist and her heart hurt.  Others just walked out of his life. But the worst were the ones, when he was still very small, who backed away with eyes full of fear. The last she knew, the green light and the twist of desperation and revulsion on features familiar to Rey, now gone from her too, and the fall of stone.

 

"Say something."  A sibilant hiss that blended with the noise of the lift's opening doors.

 

 **I'm here.  But I don't understand.** His shoulders relaxed just a fraction, she thought, at the confirmation of her presence.

 

Ben stalked down a hallway, as though tracking prey.  Inside, though, the silent memories hunted him. A second set of pneumatic hisses, and they'd reached his stark, black rooms.  He reached up to release the catch and pulled off his mask.

 

Folk on Jakku didn't generally get the opportunity to be anything but sun and wind-burned, not under the punishing light and heat.  Rey hadn't imagined the moonlight shade of him could get any paler; she'd been wrong. The scar she'd given him was prominent, livid against his bloodless face, and the whites showed all around his eyes.  She could see now they were very much like Leia's.

 

"It's too quiet.  It's...not out there," he made a vague gesture that took in the space around him, then laid a finger on his own temple. "In here." Ben was breathing fast, the rapid rise and fall of his broad chest visible even through all the layers he wore, like armor.  "I've never been alone in here before."

 

Rey was certain he could feel her surprise. **Never?  So...even when you were young...**

 

He shook his head.  "He was always there."  He didn't have to say who.  That image was in his mind too, two halves of a golden robe and its startled occupant tumbling from the throne.  "I thought it was...I don't know what I thought. That the Force spoke to me? That I was giving myself advice because no one else was going to help me?  I was too young to know that not everyone had a voice like that. And by the time I understood..." He was pacing, back and forth the length of the room, but there was no escaping any of this.

 

Ben stopped, and sat on the bed, as though he'd heard that thought.  Perhaps he had. "I knew...because he'd told me. I knew my...the General and...the smuggler, they wouldn't understand.  They didn't have what I had, they didn't have to actively _work_ to keep themselves from using the Force, from bathing in the constant stream of it.  They'd be frightened of me, disgusted by my lack of control. I needed a teacher, he said."  Ben had said that to her. She wondered if he remembered that, if he could hear that echo now, in the vast quiet she'd found behind his walls.  Rey was trying not to look. It wasn't easy. And she might need to know, to...help? "I needed someone who wouldn't turn away when they realized what I was and what kind of power I wielded."

 

He scrubbed a hand over his face.  "He was always there. He was the only one who was always there.  No matter where I was and what was happening to me, at least I always had that voice, the words in my head that let me know that someone was there."

 

Ben's mouth twisted.  "I didn't always like what he had to say, but I knew I needed it. I knew he was only trying to improve me." The words were pouring out now, as though making enough sound outside his mind would fill the abandoned space within it.  "He told me I was weak so I could make myself better. He told me what others thought, how they hated me, so I wouldn't fall into a trap, so I could stand apart. No one else would tell me, not aloud, about the weakness, the conflict, the broken parts of me, so that I could learn.  He told me what I was, so I could be something stronger.” _You’re nothing...but not to me_ , she remembered.   Did he still believe those things, even now?

 

“He helped me understand that the Light wouldn't want me, angry, destructive, resentful; that to them I was something to be feared, to be _caged_."  He was up again, as though that word had propelled him across the room, hands so tightly wound into fists that Rey could hear the leather of his gloves creak.  And another sound, a *thud* of impact on metal, that she heard before she had time to register what it was.

 

He'd slammed his hand into the wall.  Rey could hear that sound, translated into pain, drop into the silent void, a solitary visitor in the hollow stillness. **And now there’s nothing and no one.** A thought without words.  Ben tilted his head, considering, then did it again, and again, until his head was full of red-hot flashes and the room was full of grunts of effort and the crunch of his knuckles.

 

 **Ben, stop!** A growl, as she spoke his name.  Rey put herself, insofar as she was really here, between him and the dented metal of the wall.  His arm stilled on its way forward as he blinked at her. She still wasn't entirely sure how she felt about him, but that didn't mean she was going to watch this. And he'd asked.   **I'm here.  You can hear me. You're not alone.**  He could.  Her voice replaced the sounds of hurt he'd made, settled over the images and memories like a blanket, covered them like derelict ships buried in sand.

 

So Rey talked.  She talked about the things she'd found, ranging across the Jakku desert.  She told him about the people one might meet, trading parts for portions in the vast reclamation project that kept body and soul together for denizens of Niima Outpost and the swarms of scavengers that lit on it, roamed away and returned, like carrion-eaters to a kill.

 

She listed the different ships she'd learned to fly on her flight simulator, patched together from spit and baling wire and boredom.  She was used to filling silence.

 

Rey kept going, words and nonsense tumbling out into the room, and more importantly between them, into his head.  She talked about seeing the ocean for the first time as he stumbled into the 'fresher, emerging dressed in some sort of sleep clothing, soft pants and a shirt.  Black, of course. Porgs, why was she telling him about porgs? He wouldn't care. But the bloody handprint he'd left on the 'fresher door-frame stood out like a third entreaty.   _Don't leave me alone._

 

As he sat heavily on the edge of the bed again, Rey could feel her cot under her, back at the new Resistance base, and the tug of her body wanting sleep.  Was the connection closing again? She didn't want to leave now. This felt important.

 

Ben was just sitting, passively, elbows on his knees.  They'd touched, before, hadn't they? She concentrated on the things she could see in this room; on the bed, on him.  The sensation of the rough canvas and blanket of her cot was gradually replaced by the feel of the soft black sheets, the chill of her unheated quarters back at the base with the warmth radiating from the man next to her.  Rey knew she'd succeeded in...whatever it was she was trying to do when she smelled the soap he'd used to wash his hands.

 

That must have stung.  

 

Now fully present, she thought (who knew?), Rey crawled up on to the bed behind him.  She'd stopped talking to concentrate, and she could sense the hush fall over him again, the only sound in the room his uneven breathing and the shockingly loud thump of his heart.  Inside, there was no sound at all, except the ringing you could hear sometimes when the quiet got to be too much.

 

"...are you...?"   He was hoarse from all the words, more words than she'd imagined he might possess at one time.  Well, so was she.

 

"Yes.  I'm right here."  He started, her voice perceptible in the air of the room now, not just between his ears; but he didn't turn around, as though afraid she still might not be there.  That was fair. She knew that feeling, too.

 

Rey arranged herself cross-legged on the bed, facing away from him, and just leaned back, hands in her lap.  His back was solid and warm, an anodyne for the cold she was still feeling from her faraway quarters. He jerked back when her shoulders made contact, then settled against her, cautiously, until they were holding each other upright.

 

"I'm not going anywhere if I can help it, Ben."  

 

She could hear the words doubled now, tripled, multiplied, heard with ears and minds and hearts.  Gradually, in the painful emptiness within him, a double rhythm emerged, the beat of his pulse and her slower calm, her breathing in steady counterpoint to the great lungfuls of air that didn't seem to satisfy him.

 

"Don’t forget to have someone look at that hand, in the morning.”  She felt his muscles working as he nodded. “I worked on a Y-wing engine today.  I was glad to get my hands on one. I want to know them all, fix them, fly them,make them better, make *me* better. There was a problem with one of the relays..."  Rey yawned, interrupting herself. But the words continued in the connection between them, flowing without pause whether her mouth was making them or not. She heard them in his mind too, and she could feel a smile make its way unwillingly to the corners of his mouth as he smelled the grease under her nails and the ozone from the sparking relay, heard the snaps and cracks.  A schematic, stark in white lettering on blue background, presented itself before her inner eye, the relay outlined and annotated clearly on the page.

 

Ben's good hand groped its way across the sheet, seeking.  Rey laid hers palm-downwards on the bed beside her. His fingers twitched away when they encountered it, as though burned; then returned until her hand was covered, engulfed by his larger one.  A quiver made its way from his bones out to his skin where it rested against her own, and receded as she made no move to pull away from him.

 

Rey could feel herself falling asleep, the blueprint growing foggier and her outer sight dark as her eyes closed.  She tried to listen as she drowsed, for the dangerous sound of nothing that had drawn him to ask an enemy for help and comfort, just so there would be someone to hear.  Now, though, she heard what he was hearing. The soft slow surge of her heart, and his, now slowed to match, mixed with the swells of their intertwined breathing, like the surf on Ahch-To.  

 

And in a place between dreaming and vision, the *titch titch* of a wrench tightening bolts wove itself into the pattern as they worked side by side, somehow, on the engine pictured in the space between them.  That, too, began to fade; Rey wondered when he would sleep, but she couldn't stay awake. She drifted off to the cadence they'd made together, feeling it soothe them both.

 

"Thank you," dropped through the cloudy layers of descending sleep.  Rey smiled. She was still warm.

**Author's Note:**

> It's possible, unfortunately, to miss the presence of something that hurt you, because it was something.


End file.
